This Potpourri smells like shit!!!

For those of you who post on CIN or follow it's many tiny dramas, a new low was reached today.

You can check it out here:

http://www.chicagoimprov.org/forum/index.php?t=thread&frm_id=30

(Sorry, you'll have to cut and paste it, yourself. I don't want the sites mod to trace your links back to this blog.)

Dale Hilley*, the new owner and moderator and amateur fascist, has established a new Forum for one purpose. - To talk about the things that HE wants to talk about by a SELECT GROUP of posters in THE MANNER that HE wants them discussed. He calls it Potpourri and the only post in the forum right now, lays down his "rules" for the Forum.

(Jesus, in reading the "guidelines", I am suddenly reminded of the cliques in my elementary school, the "Kool Kids Klub" and its mysterious, unknowable methods of admission and guidelines for behavior. Nothing seems to have changed from there to here.)

Dale has railed on and on about how low the quality things are on CIN. It's a theme that he never gets tired of exploring. The diatribes are mind-numbingly consistent. (Autistic children marvel at his consistency.)

And there's nothing wrong with his being a cranky bastard who assumes the authority to tell people what they are doing is wrong. EXCEPT. He then turns around and basically DOES the very things that he rails on. Over and over again.

Idle posting? Check!
Masturbatory Self Interest? Check!
Discussion about Pop Culture with nothing new added? Check!
Random pics posted for obscure reasons? Check!
Posting incessantly? Check!

For a time, I was his whipping boy over there.
His posterboy for what was wrong with the board. And I fought back as hard as I could. God, so much time wasted on that board, debating issues with him.

And then he said something that clicked with me. That showed me the actual drive behind his arguments. Basically, he said...

"I don't want you to post on CIN, dominating the discussion and influencing how people post on the board."

He didn't want that, because he saw that as HIS job.

It was then that I realized that I was dealing with a "Crazy Person". Someone who can't really be blamed for his actions because he couldn't control them. Or understand their motivations. If you were to ask him, he wouldn't remember saying that. He wouldn't understand his own motivations for saying that. He doesn't know himself very well. And he knows his audience even less well.

So, now there's a Forum set up "just for intellectual discourse of an intelligent variety." Bits are welcomed there, but only REALLY FUNNY, INTELLIGENT bits. Which, as Dave has said many times, only a small cadre of his personal friends are capable of constructing or enjoying. In the same original post in the forum, Dave assures us that the moderators of the board are "regular posters who've been around since the early days of CIN" and "not at all who you'd think they were". Which tells me that it's PRECISELY who I think they are and leading the troops is King Shitbird Glorianus, himself.

Nothing has changed in the two months since I left the board.

Dave runs rampant and now has contructed his own personal "green zone" for his elitist friends to masturbate into. He has even laid down some flexible guidelines to justify his future censorships and social abuses.

And he has served up one more heaping reminder that:

You are not good enough.
You are all doing it wrong.
He is right. You are wrong.
He will show you how it should be done.
Everything would be better, if you would just shut up and do what he tells you.

As I said, nothing has changed...

Cheers,
Mr. B

PS. I don't have any illusions that what I did there was important.
I don't think that any of it mattered in the long run. And I only ended up raising my own blood pressure. And in the end, he got what he wanted. I left the board to come start this blog. And he's ran around on the board since then, thumping his chest and bullying anyone that he wanted to. He's the big ape in the monkeyhouse over there. Which was what he always wanted. So, there's no way that I could rationally say that I "won" anything from all of that time spent fighting him.
I just wanted to clarify that. When I say that I used to "actively resist him", it is only a personal point of pride. That, and two bucks will get you a cup of coffee.

*I post his name under a pseudonym because I know for a fact that shitbird Googles himself every two or three days. I don't want it leading him here. I don't want his stink on my blog.